The “Siri Recap” feature that Apple announced in September is finally available in a developer beta, and I’ve spent the last 24 hours with the feature turned on. It’s even more unsettling than the “Live Rewind” feature that launched at the same time. It listens to all my conversations, and produces summaries that are both helpful and deeply creepy.
Apple Watch Series 12 (GPS, 42mm) $389.99 at Amazon Shop Now Shop Now $389.99 at AmazonThe recaps somberly mention silly memes my kids were laughing about, and make major bullet points out of offhand remarks from brief conversations. If a conversation sticks to a single topic, I’ll often get a reasonably good summary of it, with specific facts and numbers highlighted; but just as often, Siri will get confused and mix up several topics or completely mishear a name or phrase.
Music recognition, better known as Shazam. We’ve had a version of this on the Apple Watch for a long time now, although it has some improvements and now identifies music automatically.
Live Rewind, which gives you an on-wrist transcript of the last 15 seconds of detected speech.
Live Rewind had the flashiest demo from the Apple event: A server rattled off the day’s specials at a restaurant, and then the Apple Watch-wearing diner checked his watch to see a readout of exactly which dishes had just been mentioned. The utility is both obvious and kind of unnecessary: Why wouldn’t you just ask the server to repeat the list while they’re standing right there?
But Siri Recaps? Those are both useful and unsettling. I enabled the feature, and decided to test it out later. But since it was on, it dutifully listened in as I picked up my son from school and gave him an update on an ailing family member’s health. We stopped by the library, and along the way we chatted about a variety of things: holiday travel plans, library policies, and the possibility of humans living in space in the future. Siri was listening to it all.
How to turn on Siri recaps
After you're updated to 27.3, go into the Watch app, tap Siri, and turn on Siri Recap. You can set a schedule for when it should listen (for example, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., if you want it on for the work day but off for the evening). You'll need to set a passcode on your watch, and you'll be guided through a step to upgrade your audio connection. The control center on the watch will have a button you can use to turn Siri recaps on and off at will. To read your recaps, go to the Siri app on your phone.
But still: I feel weird publishing the contents of these recaps, because they do contain things that people said to me in what they assumed was a private setting. I had the feature on when I attended a choir practice, and Siri recapped the brief chats I had with other choir members before and after practice. (Interestingly, it did not recap any of the quiet conversations I had with fellow sopranos while the tenors were rehearsing their part. I’m not sure if the watch was unable to hear us over the music, or if Siri is programmed not to listen when music is being played.)
When it comes to the content of the discussion, the recap notes a bullet point of “skepticism regarding permanent space colonies within the next 100 years.” It didn’t include my reasons for being skeptical, and didn’t mention my son’s opposing viewpoint at all. If I were using this recap to jog my memory of the conversation, it wouldn’t be all that helpful.
Siri recaps may be useful, but at what cost?
I should probably turn Siri recaps off. It seems wrong to let people chat with me without letting them know that their conversation is being ... well, not technically recorded, but basically recorded.
I would be a fool to rely on the recaps, though. The most important points of a conversation are often left out; Siri doesn’t know what’s actually important, and there’s no way to guide it as to what to pay attention to. Specific details can be wrong, as I mentioned. There’s also no way to control when a “conversation” starts or stops, unless you are turning the recap feature on and off from the watch.
And there’s more: Not only are names usually omitted (wait, who did she say I should ask about that project?), the few identifiers that make it into the recap, like names of events, are often wrong. Subjects of discussion are often conflated in really unhelpful ways: My husband mentioned paying for certain course registrations for one of our children, and later I talked to that child about an unrelated exam. The recap got all of these things mixed up with each other and was wrong about pretty much every detail. About all the recap could usefully do is to remind me that something about AP U.S. History was discussed. Reading the recaps can be like reliving your day entirely in the passive voice.
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